That's What She Said: My Baby Birth Plan
- Dawn Dumont | March 24, 2015
The baby blogs
say that a “well-prepared parent” arrives at the hospital with a birth plan. A
birth plan is a detailed list of how you and your partner want the labour to go
and covers things from epidurals (hell, yes) to saving the placenta (an option
for only the most extreme hoarders among us.) The birth plan even asks how you would like to
give birth and offers the following options: reclining in bed, on your side, on
all fours or squatting. I want to meet
the woman who chooses squatting over reclining – she’s got to have some
powerful quads and apparently no self-consciousness whatsoever. Also, there
needs to be a fifth option which is “so high that I think that Willie Nelson is
my nurse.”
This detailed baby-plan
advice contradicts other baby advice about how you’re supposed to be
laissez-faire about the whole birthing process as in “let go of expectations
and let the pain wash over and cleanse you.” Like an acidic body-wash, I guess.
Generally all
advice on babies contradicts all the other advice. There will be peace in the Middle East before
mommies agree on the best way to get a baby to sleep through the night. The only thing that there’s consensus on is
that you shouldn’t feed babies steak and I’m sure right now Alicia Silverstone
is pre-chewing some to spit into her kid’s mouth – true story.
I decided to
put together a birth plan because “winging it” it is how I got pregnant in the
first place. Here’s what my plan looks
like:
We arrive at
the hospital at eight p.m. It’s the
perfect time because it’s after rush hour so we don’t have to deal with all of
Saskatoon’s aggressive drivers and plethora of “Learner” drivers. And it’s not
too late that we’re stuck in a waiting room full of teenagers with alcohol poisoning.
Check in at the
front desk is quick and we barely have enough time to update our Facebook
status to, “Baby Arriving Soon!” before being taken to a hospital room. We
share a room with a lovely couple, a lawyer and a women’s studies professor, who
keep us in stitches with their pregnancy mishaps and we, in turn, regale them
with ours. We make plans to go to Cuba together after all this is over.
My doctor
checks in with me. He’s the best in “the pulling babies out of the hoo-ha field”
(sorry forgot to look up what that area of medicine is actually called) and he
looks like George Clooney in his E.R. days. He can tell just from looking at
me, that I am exactly 31 minutes from giving birth. There’s only enough time
for me to finish my latte and watch one episode of the Mindy Project before I’m
whisked off to a pristine labour room where AC DC’s Thunderstruck gently plays
in the background.
Once labour
starts, I don’t even have to push, the baby sort of swims through the birth
canal and then uses his tiny hands to pry himself out, like a smart
monkey. (I don’t know why more babies
don’t figure this out.) Everyone in the room breaks into spontaneous applause
at the beauty of the birth. I say something witty like, “I don’t know why they
call that Labour that was more like Play-bour.” Everyone laughs and smiles,
even the baby.
Once the baby has
been bathed in mountain spring water infused with the scent of Tiger Lilies, my
partner is about to cut the cord when an eagle flies in through the window and
cuts it with his beak. Later the eagle helpfully
eats the placenta because it’s gross and no one wants to look at it.
My baby and I
take a selfie and post it directly to Instagram where two hundred thousand
people like it – including Rihanna! Despite
just having gone the birthing process, my baby and I both look calm, refreshed
and thin.
Then we go back
to the maternity ward room where we eat chocolate chip cookie dough blizzards
(the baby just has a smoothie.) From
beginning to end the entire process has taken less than one hour.
Other parents
rush up to us, asking us for the secret to our success and I say kindly, “It’s
really important to have a great birthing plan.”
So that’s my birth plan, and in less than two months, we’ll see how close we get to that.
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